nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts—­was accompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part of things in general.  His discontent passed vapor-like through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to that inappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.

Poor Mr. Casaubon!  This suffering was the harder to bear because it seemed like a betrayal:  the young creature who had worshipped him with perfect trust had quickly turned into the critical wife; and early instances of criticism and resentment had made an impression which no tenderness and submission afterwards could remove.  To his suspicious interpretation Dorothea’s silence now was a suppressed rebellion; a remark from her which he had not in any way anticipated was an assertion of conscious superiority; her gentle answers had an irritating cautiousness in them; and when she acquiesced it was a self-approved effort of forbearance.  The tenacity with which he strove to hide this inward drama made it the more vivid for him; as we hear with the more keenness what we wish others not to hear.

Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think it quite ordinary.  Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot?  I know no speck so troublesome as self.  And who, if Mr. Casaubon had chosen to expound his discontents—­ his suspicions that he was not any longer adored without criticism—­ could have denied that they were founded on good reasons?  On the contrary, there was a strong reason to be added, which he had not himself taken explicitly into account—­namely, that he was not unmixedly adorable.  He suspected this, however, as he suspected other things, without confessing it, and like the rest of us, felt how soothing it would have been to have a companion who would never find it out.

This sore susceptibility in relation to Dorothea was thoroughly prepared before Will Ladislaw had returned to Lowick, and what had occurred since then had brought Mr. Casaubon’s power of suspicious construction into exasperated activity.  To all the facts which he knew, he added imaginary facts both present and future which became more real to him than those because they called up a stronger dislike, a more predominating bitterness.  Suspicion and jealousy of Will Ladislaw’s intentions, suspicion and jealousy of Dorothea’s impressions, were constantly at their weaving work.  It would be quite unjust to him to suppose that he could have entered into any coarse misinterpretation of Dorothea:  his own habits of mind and conduct, quite as much as the open elevation of her nature, saved him from any such mistake.  What he was